I’ve been doing my semi annual “clean every damn thing in the house” ritual, for lo these last 48 hours. I’m pretty thorough about it, too – everything gets taken off shelves and dusted, from books to knick knacks.

Today, that involved cleaning and dusting all the crap stuff on my downstairs bookshelves, including the fugly “where the hell did I pick that up?” wooden folk art ram that usually sits on the top shelf. Here’s a close up of the ram, in his normal place atop the book shelf:

When bad collectibles happen to good people.

OK, sorta creepy, but nothing too out of the ordinary. As usual, when I dust I take everything down, and put it wherever I can find space. In this case, I stuck the ram on the window sill, next to the TV. I then forgot all about it, until Sean walked downstairs and asked me “What the hell Tula and Delilah were doing”.

What they were doing, apparently, was worshiping at the altar of their new personal God, the wooden ram.

"What was that, Lord Ram? Kill the humans in their sleep?"

You have to put this in context, OK? Tula and Delilah did not move from underneath the windowsill for a good twenty minutes. Occasionally, Delilah would get a little overly enthusiastic and try to climb up closer to the windowsill, in which case Tula would lay a beating on her, and then they’d both go back to their previous poses of attentive worship.

Delilah gets closer to God

Twenty minutes. My dogs can’t stay focused on a steak for twenty minutes, let alone a wooden statue. It was starting to get a little bit creepy, so we put Lord Ram back up on top of the book shelf.

Didn’t help.

Oh Sky Ram, we still love you...

After about two hours of this, Tula had pretty much lost most of her interest. Not Delilah, though. She remained faithful – so faithful, in fact, that I felt compelled to break out the video camera.

It could be worse, I suppose. We could have had to break it to her that there’s no Santa Claus. Nah, she’d never believe that. My dogs KNOW there’s a Santa, and that they’re all on the ‘nice’ list, no matter how naughty they’ve been all year!

Too cute! Thank heavens I live way far away. I have a big warm fuzzy spot for fuglies and other odd little lost souls.

I live well away from our main population/adoption areas, so I don’t foster the ready to adopt. I specialize in the itchy, sticky, ooey and gooey. and the generally run down and needs time. Or the odd and we need to figure out what to do with!.

Around here, Edmund would be snapped up sooo fast. We have had some, um, interesting looking dogs to say the least and it’s amazing there really is a butt for every seat!

I am personally a sucker for crusty old misanthropes. Not mean or aggressive dogs, just the crabby old confirmed bachelors and bachelorettes.

Now about Lord Ram, I think you may be in trouble, they will probably go back for more instructions when everyone is asleep. My dogs still blame their bad behavior on things the Dancing Elmo told them to do.

It’s entirely possible. Right now, it only seems to be speaking to Delilah (who has always listened to her own weird inner voices — this is the dog who won’t come down the stairs). If it starts talking to Sailor, we’ve got big, big problems. I’m pretty sure Sailor can figure out how to operate power tools. Like the chain saw.

Our old JR once decided that he wasn’t keen on a carved wooden duck at my parent’s place. Nevermind that he’d probably walked by it a hundred times on previous visits. Nevermind that it wasn’t even a realistic one with paint, etc. Nevermind that he’d seen “real” ducks and geese tons of times during walks in Toronto.

On this one visit – he’d walk by the duck and growl softly. Then he started stalking it, doing little Jack Russell jumps at it (never getting too close, of course). We finally took it off the shelf and put it on the floor so he could really check it out – took him a long time (for a Jack Russell) to get up the nerve to actually give it a good sniff.

The look he gave us was akin to a withering glance from some jaded old timer who felt we’d played a trick on him to make him look foolish on purpose. Of course it was somehow our fault *grins*

My late bulldog Lucie was convinced that canned and bottled beverages were possessed. If you held one out towards her, she would bark fiercely and back away. Soda cans, bottled water, bottled soda. She could hear the voices from within them.

Are you done with your cleaning frenzy? Because we could use you down here next. We’ll feed you well, free internet access and all the dog attention you can stand. Oh, and we get all the cable channels and satellite radio, you just have to share the living room with us and withstand the flatulence. Let us know.